SPARC Symposium Concert: Erik Nyström

This event is part of the 2025 SPARC Symposium (4-8 June 2025). To see all symposium events, please visit the overview page.

General admission: £5
Unwaged / City St George's Students and Staff: Free admission -  please sign up to attend here .

Programme:

Erik Nyström

• compose/decompose
• Intra-action
• Unformation
• Texton Mirrors

What could a synthetic laboratory environment sound like? Erik Nyström presents a concert in anticipation of his forthcoming album Intra-action, featuring a programme of works in which algorithms and systems where sounds influence and shape one another are key forces of material and form. Subverting principles of control and information, dominating human societies and technologies, this music seeks to affirm the life, soul and interior agency of ‘unformation’. The music is presented live on the SPARC Lab multichannel sound system.

About Erik Nyström:

Erik Nyström is a composer whose output includes electroacoustic works, live computer music, and sound installations. The majority of his works are created for multichannel sound projection, and among the recurring interests in his artistic research practice are synthetic sound, algorithmic and generative systems, spatial texture, posthumanism, artificial intelligence, and acousmatic listening experiences. He also writes on topics related to these themes.

Erik Nyström’s music is performed internationally and recent appearances include Bloomsbury Festival 2024 (London), AIMC 2024 (Oxford), Noisefloor 2024 (Lisbon), Conservatory of Milan 2024, BEAST (Un)festival 2023, New York City Electroacoustuic Music Festival 2023, BEAST FEaST 2022 (Birmingham), AIMC 2021 (Graz, Austria), NIME 2020 (Birmingham) Ars Electronica Festival 2019 (Linz, Austria), NEXT Festival 2019 (Bratislava, Slovakia), Influx 2019 (Brussels, Belgium). During 2019 he was also involved in CECIA (Collaborative Electroacoustic Composition with Intelligent Agents), a collaborative project hosted by ZKM (Karlsruhe). His music is released on empreintes DIGITALes and his writings have appeared in Organised Sound, EContact!, ICMC and NIME proceedings.

Currently Lecturer in Music at City St George's, University of London, Erik Nyström was previously a Leverhulme Research Fellow at BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre), University of Birmingham. He studied electroacoustic composition with Denis Smalley at City St George's, completing an MA and a PhD. Prior to this (2006-7) he attended the Computer Music course at CCMIX (Centre de Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis) during which he received influential composition tuition from Gerard Pape and had many formative experiences taking master classes with visiting lecturers including Curtis Roads, Trevor Wishart, Jean-Claude Risset, Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu, and Agostino di Scipio.